Bicycle Safety

This evening, Adopt-a-Bike-Lane and Transportation Alternatives will launch a campaign for a protected bike lane on Delancey Street by leading escorted "bike commuter pools" across the Williamsburg Bridge. Reads a TA press release:

Arturo Flores, a Queens musician who played Andean wind instruments, was struck and killed by a van this Tuesday while biking in Astoria. Reports of his death have appeared in a local message board, neighborhood blogs, and a Peruvian music blog. Conventional news coverage has not surfaced online, but a sparse account appeared in the print edition of the Daily News:

Vision Zero is about more than looking both ways.

How effective are bike lanes at enticing people to ride? Portland State University professor Jennifer Dill has been looking into that question for more than a year, and her research is starting to get some attention. Using GPS trackers to map more than 1,700 bike trips, Dill found that about half of all bike travel occurs on dedicated infrastructure like bike lanes or bike boulevards, even though such routes comprise only eight percent of Portland's street network.

Check out this video, via BikePortland.org, on bicycle safety, part of a Portland Water Bureau campaign to reduce truck-cyclist collisions there. Last month, the Water Bureau held a bike safety seminar, which involved cyclists climbing into the cab of a city truck to see (or not see) driver blind spots for themselves.

The Sands Street bike path, a physically protected approach to the Manhattan Bridge, has languished behind schedule for years, held up in the city's construction bureaucracy. The project serves as a prime illustration that livable streets hinge not just on DOT, but on other, more obscure city agencies as well.

As I wrote in a post last week, the City of Melbourne, Australia, is working hard to make cycling easier and safer -- but not quickly enough to save the life of one cyclist. The day after my post a 33-year-old Melbourne woman was killed when her wheels slipped on tram tracks on Melbourne's main thoroughfare, Swanston Street, and she fell into the path of an oncoming Gray Line tour bus.

A couple of days ago we relayed the remarkable story of Colin Beavan's close call with a careless motorist, which ended with the parties shaking hands. Yesterday, No Impact Man encountered another inattentive driver -- one State Senator Jeff Klein -- but this time there were no heartwarming epiphanies.